The displaying of paintings, sketches, photographs, and other images is very popular in business and personal settings. For example, most homes and offices have paintings or photographs on their walls. It can be very expensive, however, to purchase, maintain, and display high-quality paintings—so much so that most businesses and families choose not to do so. As a result, most images that are displayed are low-cost reproductions of high-quality images or originals of low-quality paintings. Because viewers can tire of seeing the same painting on a daily basis, some businesses change the location of the paintings that they display to provide more variety to their customers and employees.
Various electronic means have been used to display image to help reduce the cost of displaying images and increase the variety of images that are displayed. For example, slide programs for general-purpose computers have been developed to display images (e.g., stored in JPEG format) on display device such as a computer monitor. These slide shows typically cycle through displaying a set of images (e.g., defined by a display list) at a fixed rate. Some electronic frames have been developed that allow a user to upload their own photographs for display on a screen within the frame. These electronic frames can, much like a slide show program, cycle through displaying a set of photographs. It can be a time-consuming process, however, to change the set of images that are displayed either by a slide show program or an electronic picture frame. To change a set of images, a person may need to search for, pay for, and download an electronic version of an image and create a display list that includes that image.
These current means for displaying images have disadvantages that relate to the difficulty of specifying the images that are to be displayed and how they are displayed. It would be desirable to have a user-friendly technique for allowing a user to specify a complex plan that defines how images are to be sequenced, transitioned, panned, zoomed, and so on.